Welcome to our video, and thanks for coming to visit. We are very much looking forward to our discussion this week. We are just getting started with our project, and will host our first summer workshop this year. We'd love to know what you've learned about these things:

1. Working in rural settings, applying principles of culturally responsive pedagogy in rural settings or with indigenous students.

2. Using technology to connect teachers at a distance to each other, and support professional learning.

3. Social network analysis--if you're using it, we'd love to connect about that too.

We hope you enjoy the video, and that you'll connect us to your related projects.

 Hi Rebecca and Team!
The reference to 3D science instruction caught me at first. I was expecting 3D printing and LiDAR scanning… A fine-print disclaimer might help the naive visitors ;-)  I have not done formal teaching in rural areas but I have designed professional development programs for informal learning in remote, outdoor settings - updating national park interpretation practices for 21st century audiences (i.e. training park rangers).

We found shocking differences in on-the-ground dynamics at the different sites - at Carlsbad Cavern National Park, it was all about running the elevators (some of the highest in the world!) or shepherding visitors down the natural path. You can’t touch anything in the cave! Hands-on takes on a different meaning with these visitors.  Science learning takes a back row when these things are on the rangers’ mind.  At Acadia National Park, it was all about managing the auto traffic for the 3M+ annual visitors. But once on the trails, you could touch the maple and blueberries all you want. Maybe not the beavers!?  I wonder if you have or expect to see similar differences across the school districts.  

On the technology front, we found that the very thing that visitors want, leave the city behind, made our work hard - WiFi or cell phone reception was spotty at best, and when there, it was SLOW.  We found it frustrating to develop interactive and visual content for network sharing.  I am wondering if there are similar analogies in your context and what you are prepared to do about it.

A couple of words of advise - keep an open mind!  After the first round of PD at our sites, when program “graduates” started moving to other parks (because that’s what park rangers like to do) we thought the project was over. It turned out to be the best thing to happen to it - our project transformed from a regional scale to a national. Do rural teachers do that? Do they like to move around like park rangers? 

Thank you for viewing our presentation on our work with rural science teachers.  Working with teachers, schools, & districts that are isolated by distance is a wonderful opportunity.  We are seeing how collaboration with peers in similar situations develops capacity & expertise in meeting learner needs.  These experiences are also developing teacher leaders who then give back to the local educational community. We hope you enjoy learning about our work.

Very interesting discussion of your project and use of technology.  The work you describe on studying social networking analysis is of interest to me.  If I understand your work is being done with practicing teachers.  Do you have any findings or pointers on how this might work or could enhance the work with preservice and beginning teachers?

This sounds like a wonderful project. I live and work in a rural area so I deeply appreciate the importance of educators building connections to mitigate feels of isolation and overwhelm. (and of course COVID made that far worse). I hope you'll have the research capacity to characterize not just the density of connections but the nature and depth of those connections - it may be that just having one or two deep colleagues makes a huge difference.

Since this has such great potential as a program, I want to understand the model better: Aren't these teachers embedded in some kind of school or district-based structure as they teach and do PD? If so, how does that play out here? Are these groups of teachers who already work together, or strangers who teach the same grade band? Or is the PD across all grade bands? Research shows teacher professional learning is most effective when teams of teachers do it together at their school or district and can support each other, so is this model trying to create that kind of collaborative curriculum design across districts (given that many rural teachers are the only science teacher in their school)? That would be an amazing achievement! But then, you also talk about culturally responsive pedagogy so I wonder whether it's really going to be possible for teachers to do deep co-design across settings like that. 

Thank you for sharing your work. It is wonderful to hear the testimony of the science teacher participants and the benefits they see in the project. I also work in a rural setting. A few of us engaged in somewhat similar work: We invited teams of mathematics, science, and intervention specialist teachers to a summer professional development program and supported their collaboration within and across schools over the following academic year. Our participants shared many positives about the collaborative nature of the program, the support and resources they found in each other, whether it was science/math specific or about their work more broadly. However, we found it difficult to sustain these relationships past the life of the project. What are your thoughts about strategies for sustaining the networks you are nurturing moving forward?

Another aspect of the project I want to ask about is the "technology-mediated lesson study." Are you saying the teachers watch each other in real time, using the swivl? Or are they looking at recordings afterwards? And how do you manage the scheduling if everyone is watching everyone else? Are they watching a whole lesson? Do all the teachers have swivls or are they just on loan from the project? Lastly, it seems you're bringing teachers physically together, but isn't this challenging for rural teachers? Do you do any of it virtually? You can see I have lots of questions about the tech aspects - I lead a project that provides virtual coaching in rural areas so I'm curious about the way you structure the lesson study. Thanks! (https://stemforall2020.videohall.com/presentati...)

Hi Sue! Thank you for the follow-up questions. I am a Co-PI on this project. With the technology-mediated lesson study teachers work together to design a lesson then one of the teachers teaches it in their own classroom. They record the lesson using Swivl. We have tried to keep a quick turnaround on the feedback. They notify other teachers when they have posted and reflected on the lesson. The other teachers then watch the recording and provide feedback on the lesson prior to them meeting again virtually to make adjustments to the lesson. They then repeat the cycle with another teacher teaching the lesson. One of the challenges is getting the timing right so that teachers are able to teach the lesson in sequence with the units they are teaching in their classrooms.

Each of the teachers has access to their own Swivl in their school or receives one on loan from the project. Our teachers met in person for a 5-day summer workshop and then on a Friday/Saturday 4 times throughout the school year. In between the in-person meetings they met virtually to discuss the lessons they had initially worked on.

We found that once our teachers got to know each other through the in-person meetings, they opened up and allowed themselves to be quite vulnerable, allowing others virtually into their classroom. I loved the way they all grew in both content and pedagogical knowledge.

Hello team, thank you for highlighting the ongoing issues that occur in  rural education settings. They are often beyond the scope of understanding if you have not experienced these settings. I live in a district comprised of 9 rural towns, one of which does not have broadband Internet even. The students  (and teachers ) had a disproportionately difficult time during COVID remote learning. This sounds like a very useful means of reaching rural teachers and learners! Thank you for your work! 

This is fantastic! As someone who conducts rural outreach and education in Utah, I am pleased to see the work you are putting forth to engage and develop our teachers (and students) in these effective teaching (and learning) processes. Something we've found at AmericaView (and is very much true in Utah) - is the challenges faced by teachers when they are asked to add "one more thing" to their curriculum and classroom activities. I do fear that current teachers, as well as pre-service teachers, encounter significant overload on a daily basis. Therefore, what you are doing is critical in building skills, resources, and networks. Well done! I look forward to connecting with you further!